User talk:AndriesvN: Difference between revisions

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Here's wishing you a belated welcome to Wikipedia, AndriesvN! I see that you've already been around a while and wanted to thank you for your contributions. Though you seem to have been successful in finding your way around, you may still benefit from following some of the links below, which help editors get the most out of Wikipedia:

Need some ideas of what kind of things need doing? Try the Task Center.

If you don't already know, you should sign your posts on talk pages by using four tildes (~~~~) to insert your username and the date.

I hope you enjoy editing here and being a Wikipedian! Again, welcome! ☿ Apaugasma (talk ☉) 16:29, 4 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Hi again! Please be sure to read MOS:GOD. One of the things it stipulates is that pronouns for deities and figures of veneration are not capitalized (so no "Him", "His", etc.). It would also be nice if you would seek out some good secondary sources (reliable academic monographs would be ideal) to read about the subjects you edit, so you can use these instead of primary sources (i.e., the Bible itself) or websites. Thanks! ☿ Apaugasma (talk ☉) 16:36, 4 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Welcome to Wikipedia. Unfortunately, content you added to Prophecy of Seventy Weeks appears to be a minority or fringe viewpoint, and appears to have given undue weight to this minority viewpoint, and has been reverted. To maintain a neutral point of view, an idea that is not broadly supported by scholarship in its field must not be given undue weight in an article about a mainstream idea. Feel free to use the article's talk page to discuss this, and take a look at the welcome page to learn more about contributing to this encyclopedia. Thank you. tgeorgescu (talk) 15:18, 1 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Meaning: the idea that the Book of Daniel has historicity does not fly with mainstream academia. If you want to assert it as a matter of true belief, that might be so. But as a historical view is not even remotely tenable. WP:CHOPSY laugh at it, sneer at it. tgeorgescu (talk) 15:50, 1 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for you comment. But, no, you are completely wrong. The Liberal view is the minority view. As you correctly state, the liberal view is the one held by academics. That is the view that you have to adopt if you want to progress in the academic world. As far as the average Christian and Evangelical Christianity and most denominations are concerned, Daniel is true prophecy. In other words, most Christians by far believe that Daniel is true prophecy. Christian Liberalism is something that began I think in the 18th century. The person I quoted (Walvoord) is an extremely well known Dispensationalist and Dispensationalism is the dominant Christian view on Daniel 9. I do not share that view but I certainly believe that Daniel is true prophecy. As your page on Daniel 9 currently reads, it is extremely unbalanced. There are at least 5 different views on Daniel 9. Your post reflects only 1. I have been studying the various views for a couple of months now and have posted nearly 30 articles on my personal website. I am willing to help improve your post, if you allow me. AndriesvN (talk) 16:39, 1 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]

We have the guideline WP:FRINGE, as in "academically fringe". You have to abide by it if you want to edit at this website. I cannot sanction you, since I am not an admin, but pushing fringe POVs leads to blocks and eventually banning from Wikipedia.

And, you don't get to redefine WP:FRINGE. Your view of what is fringe is binding for... Conservapedia, not for Wikipedia. Is it a historical matter of fact? Yes, it is. So mainstream historians adjudicate the matter, not traditionalist theologians. tgeorgescu (talk) 18:41, 1 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Liberalism is the view that the Bible is purely the product of the evolution of human thought and, therefore, not divinely inspired. As such, liberalism, by definition, is a minority view within Christianity. Looking at the type of comments you reverse, I would say that you are biased towards liberalism and, therefore, in my view, unfit to do this work. AndriesvN (talk) 02:51, 2 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]

WP:NPA or DARVO won't save your POV. Mainstream academic consensus WP:OWNs Wikipedia articles, nobody else does: not Christianity, not Islam, not Hinduism, not atheism, and so on.

Agree. Sanger's central argument is that WP should never have accepted the idea of WP:false balance. He thinks we should include points of view strictly on the basis of the number of people that hold them. This would require changing the whole idea of a WP:reliable source; the most reliable source on any topic would be whatever the most people believed, whatever had the largest circulation, and factual evidence would be irrelevant.

The Bible, the Koran, and the Bhagavad Gita would be the main "reliable sources" for our articles about the Earth's origin, cosmology, evolution, and ancient history. The idea that the Democratic party is run by a secret cabal of pedophiles, that Trump won the 2022 election, that Covid is no worse than a cold, would have to be written as possible facts, given equal credibility with the truth, since about half the US population has swallowed these lies. Our biographies of celebrities would have to include, as facts, the fake scandals published in the National Enquirer, as it is a main source of celebrity info. Our medical articles would have to include, on an equal basis, not only alternative medicine cures, but curses, the evil eye, faith healing, witchcraft, and demonology, as worldwide these are 'medical' traditions believed by a large percentage of developing world populations. Our articles on Woman and Feminism would have to include, as an equal theory, that women are inherently biologically inferior to men, because a large proportion of the developing world still believes this.

In other words, Wikipedia would become like the rest of social media, Facebook Groups without the content controls, a summary of whatever the lowest common denominator believes, because they are the most numerous. --Chetvorno^TALK 19:29, 29 March 2022 (UTC)

It's fairly clear what agenda you are following by doing so - how can anyone have this discussion without concrete examples? You continue to dismiss out of hand people you identify as "theologians" (which is incorrect) or Christians (which is absurd) without any evidence that this has any affect on their scholarship. The only other places you have made these arguments have been in attempts to deny the historicity of Jesus or else, most recently, to deny that Tacitus has anything to say about it because the scholars saying he does are "biased". You have provided no evidence that mainstream scholars who happen to be Christian have reached conslusions any different than anyone else's. Ask anyone who edits in this area: scholars following a non-mainstream, fundamentalist view are regularly removed from Wikipedia. There is no problem on Wikipedia with the POV of theologists be considered a mainstream just based on the fact that their works are historically more numerous. This is just your own POV.--Ermenrich (talk) 00:53, 17 January 2020 (UTC)

Awery, just a bit of housekeeping. When you post new comments to this thread, the newest comments need to be put at the bottom of the thread. That's the only way others can easily keep track of how the conversation has flowed. The Harvard Theological Review probably is a prestigious forum. On the other hand, the paper on Daniel that you want us to use was not published by the Harvard Theological Review. It was published by JISCA, an outlet for advocating conservative religious views. This fits with the general trend we've already observed here -- the folks saying that Daniel was written in the sixth century don't publish in mainstream outlets, generally speaking. It's entirely possible that MacGregor has published all sorts of stuff in reliable outlets. JISCA, however, isn't what most editors here would treat as a WP:RS outlet. When a journal is dedicated to a particular religious view, that matters. Just as, for example, Wikipedia does not make use of articles published in Journal of Creation when dealing with the subject of creationism. The question I'd like to see answered is, have any defenses of a sixth-century date been published in mainstream academic outlets. And if they have been, are they the work of a tiny fringe group of scholars, or do they represent a significant number of scholars. So far, it looks as is the 2d-century date for Daniel assuming its present form is the scholarly consensus, although of course there are hold-outs in the religious world, just as there are hold-outs on creationism. Because of WP:FRINGE, Wikipedia generally doesn't make much use of those who hold out against academic consensus. I don't want to speak for Tgeorgescu here, but I don't think he's saying that Christian scholars are automatically disqualified due to their personal faith. Indeed, almost all biblical scholars that Wikipedia cites are either Christian or Jewish. There's only a handful of non-Christian, non-Jewish biblical scholars out there. We don't sideline the views of Christian scholars on Wikipedia, it's that we sideline the views of WP:FRINGE scholars, those whose views have been overwhelmingly rejected by the academic mainstream. Alephb (talk) 21:14, 31 December 2018 (UTC)

It is your claim that mainstream academic consensus would be "minority view" against the whole system of Wikipedia, starting with Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia admins and ending with established editors. tgeorgescu (talk) 17:00, 2 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]

So, if you want to claim that this website has been wholly sold out to the mainstream academia: it is indeed so.

“it is thus clearer than the sun at noonday that the Pentateuch was not written by Moses, but by someone who lived long after Moses.”—this is a conclusion which Wikipedia fully endorses as objective fact, and you will be booed off the stage if you dare to deny it in the voice of Wikipedia.

And if you want to perform a head count: modernists are the Christians who reject fundamentalism. And you have an extra category, evangelicals, who want to be neither modernists, nor fundamentalists. Let me tell you: if you add up fundamentalists and evangelicals, you still have a minority of all Christians. Catholic, Eastern Orthodox and the traditional Protestant churches are by and large not fundamentalists. A lot of Christians don't argue against basic Christian dogmas as they don't argue against the fact that Scholz is the Chancellor of Germany: it's a banal fact, not a life-changing truth. These dogmas learned by rote have no impact upon their use of booze, tobacco, drugs, and sexual partners. So they are modernists by deed, if not by aware intellectual assent. If you tell them that God is Trinity, they will agree it's true. If you tell them that Jesus is God's Son, they will agree it's true. But they consider these boring facts they had to learn at school, not a life-changing message. tgeorgescu (talk) 15:44, 3 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Hello, I'm Tgeorgescu. I noticed that you made a comment on the page User talk:AndriesvN that didn't seem very civil, so it may have been removed. Wikipedia is built on collaboration, so it's one of our core principles to interact with one another in a polite and respectful manner. If you have any questions, you can leave me a message on my talk page. Thank you. tgeorgescu (talk) 17:13, 2 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, once wrote:^[1][2][3][4]

Wikipedia's policies ... are exactly spot-on and correct. If you can get your work published in respectable scientific journals – that is to say, if you can produce evidence through replicable scientific experiments, then Wikipedia will cover it appropriately.

What we won't do is pretend that the work of lunatic charlatans is the equivalent of "true scientific discourse". It isn't.

So yes, we are biased.

• We are biased towards science, and biased against pseudoscience.
• We are biased towards astronomy, and biased against astrology.^[5]
• We are biased towards chemistry, and biased against alchemy.^[6]
• We are biased towards mathematics, and biased against numerology.^[7]
• We are biased towards medicine, and biased against homeopathy.^[8]
• We are biased towards venipuncture, and biased against acupuncture.^[9]
• We are biased towards solar energy, and biased against esoteric energy.^[10]
• We are biased towards actual conspiracies and biased against conspiracy theories.^[11]
• We are biased towards cargo planes, and biased against cargo cults.
• We are biased towards vaccination, and biased against vaccine hesitancy.^[12]
• We are biased towards magnetic resonance imaging, and biased against magnetic therapy.^[13]
• We are biased towards crops, and biased against crop circles.^[14]
• We are biased towards laundry detergent, and biased against laundry balls.^[15]
• We are biased towards augmentative and alternative communication, and biased against facilitated communication.
• We are biased towards water treatment, and biased against magnetic water treatment.
• We are biased towards mercury in saturated calomel electrodes, and biased against mercury in quack medicines.^[16]
• We are biased towards blood transfusions, and biased against blood letting.
• We are biased towards electromagnetic fields, and biased against microlepton fields.^[17]
• We are biased towards evolution and an old Earth, and biased against young Earth creationism.^[18]
• We are biased towards holocaust studies, and biased against holocaust denial.^[19]
• We are biased towards an (approximately) spherical earth, and biased against a flat earth.^[20]
• We are biased towards the sociology of race, and biased against scientific racism.^[21]
• We are biased towards the scientific consensus on climate change, and biased against global warming conspiracy theories.^[22]
• We are biased towards the existence of Jesus and biased against the existence of Santa Claus.^[23]
• We are biased towards geology, and biased against flood geology.^[24]
• We are biased towards medical treatments that have been proven to be effective in double-blind clinical trials, and biased against medical treatments that are based upon preying on the gullible.^[25]
• We are biased towards astronauts and cosmonauts, and biased against ancient astronauts.^[26]
• We are biased towards psychology, and biased against phrenology.
• We are biased towards Mendelism, and biased against Lysenkoism.

And we are not going to change. tgeorgescu (talk) 17:17, 2 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]

I grant you that the current academic consensus is that Daniel was written in the 2nd century BC even though the book itself states that it was written in the 6th century BC.

However, firstly, the average Christian is not even aware of that view. I mentioned this to a colleague of mine and she did not believe me. The view that Daniel was written in the second century BC is not taught in churches. Those who believe that, simply avoid the topic. Those who believe that Daniel is true prophecy, written in the 6th century BC, use it as cornerstone for their eschatology and preach other views very strongly.

And Wikipedia is not a resource for academics. It is a resource for the average person. In the case of Christian concepts, it is a resource for the average Christian. Therefore, given your emphasis on the liberal view, you are not addressing the needs of the average Christian.

Secondly, you also know that liberal criticism developed in the 19th/20th century. The reformers, e.g. Luther and Calvin, believed that Daniel is true prophecy. Again, by over-emphasizing the current scholarly consensus and by ignoring the orthodox view of Daniel 9, you are doing a disservice to your readers.

Therefore, what I would like to propose is that you allow a more balance discussion. Your section on Composition, currently, does not even address the possibility that it was composed in the 6th century. AndriesvN (talk) 05:45, 4 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Not done. See these policies and guidelines: WP:NOTTHEOCRACY, WP:CRYBLASPHEMY, WP:RNPOV. Wikipedia kowtows to the Ivy League, this is by design; you cannot change this, you're lacking any power to do so. Jimmy Wales won't permit it and Wikipedia admins won't permit it. We do not kowtow to Sanger's view that the opinion having the most adepts (this is a point which you have failed to demonstrate, by the way) would be the most acceptable.

If they want a pulpit, I suggest here, not WP. Andy Dingley (talk) 00:29, 22 January 2019 (UTC)

Morals: according to WP:SOAPBOX, Wikipedia is not your pulpit for preaching the good news. Same as we don't allow Muslims to delete pictures of Muhammad, we won't allow you to preach the good news at this website. We are a hard-core encyclopedia based upon WP:SCHOLARSHIP. If you cannot get Britannica and Larousse to endorse your POV in their own voice, well, neither will Wikipedia do that.

Oui, vous avez raison, Jimmy Wales est un pornocrate. En plus, c’est un dangereux religieux extrémiste. La preuve : http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion Et de surcroît, il appartient aussi à plein de sectes : http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secte L’enquête le confirmera, mais ce serait aussi un serial killer : http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_killer Moi non plus, je ne me laisse pas duper. J’ai aussi interdit le Larousse à mes enfants : on y expliquait ce qu’était la masturbation, la sodomie et la fellation.

— Patrice

And we report Luther's POV as being Luther's POV, not as being WP:THETRUTH. If you want a simple explanation, the neutral point of view for Wikipedia articles is the POV of the Ivy League.

As I already told you, traditionalist theologians do not own the problem of the dating of this book. Mainstream historians do. So, Wikipedia will only listen to mainstream historians and mainstream Bible scholars, as opposed to people preaching what should be the true beliefs of their own congregation. We may review what the Pope thinks about it, but Wikipedia does not consider the Pope an authority in this matter. And does not consider Luther and Calvin authorities in this matter. They might be the authorities at your own church, but they do not pass for mainstream scholars at Wikipedia.

Appeal to authority is what Wikipedia is all about. It is not the place to argue with what the authorities say. Further, Wikipedia accepts academic and scholarly authorities, not religious and dogmatic authorities. Anything else is original research. Rick Norwood (talk) 16:01, 20 October 2013 (UTC)

Wikipedia is a venue for rendering mainstream scholarship, and we despise so-called "scholars" who in fact are preaching to their own choir. We reject your view same as Britannica and Larousse have rejected it upon https://www.britannica.com/topic/biblical-literature/Daniel#ref597857 and https://www.larousse.fr/encyclopedie/oeuvre/livre_de_Daniel/115594 . Wikipedia isn't their dumber sister.

Ask any admin of the English Wikipedia and they will reject your POV, too. We simply do not peddle WP:Fringe theories. This is deeply enshrined in the identity of Wikipedia, that's who we are in respect to religious POV pushers. tgeorgescu (talk) 09:36, 4 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for all the responses. I was not expecting such a broad range of responses. I do understand your perspective. My point is not that the majority has the truth. In fact, the opposite is true. In the history as recorded in the Bible, the majority is always wrong. My point is that Wikipedia must speak to people at the level which people are at. Currently, your page on Daniel 9 does not do that. In other words, in my view, the average Christian would not understand what you are saying. Regards AndriesvN (talk) 10:43, 4 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]

You should ask yourself questions like:

What an encyclopedia is?

What an encyclopedia does?

What is an encyclopedia based upon?

Wikipedia is WP:MAINSTREAM, it does not pander to piety.

In other words, what you wish was rejected, is rejected and will remain rejected. Ask any admin and you won't get any other answer. There is no other mainstream historical dating of the Book of Daniel. This is the only mainstream historical view, there is no other, it does not have competition, it does not have challengers. So, Wikipedia won't compromise an information pertaining to mainstream history just because you beg nicely for it.

It's like asking Wikipedia to write that Columbus has discovered America in 992 AD. Won't do. No established editor in the sane mind is going to allow that.

I don't care about what "good Christians" believe about it, the dating in the 6th century BC is simply untrue. It's pseudohistory. A dating of 6th century BC is not history, it is fundamentalist superstition. This is not a superstition-friendly website.

The real problem with the fundamentalist interpretation is that it also sets a fixed date for the Second Coming—and Jesus did not return when expected, so most Christian churches have abandoned that interpretation. So, yeah, Luther, in his own century, could claim that the interpretation was accurate. But that was a ridiculous claim in the 20th century. tgeorgescu (talk) 07:27, 5 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]

The Pharisees - the intellectual elite of that day - did not believe Jesus in spite of all His miracles. Why? Because what one believes depends on what you WANT to believe. The Pharisees did not WANT to believe. Therefore, they found evidence that He is NOT the Christ. They said “He casts out demons by Beelzebul, the ruler of the demons” (Matt 9:15), and, after He, on a Sabbath, healed a man that was born blind, they said, “this man is not from God, because He does not keep the Sabbath” (John 9:16).

Jesus said to them, "How can you believe, when you receive glory from one another and you do not seek the glory that is from the one and only God?" (John 5:44), and "Woe to you Pharisees! For you love the chief seats in the synagogues and the respectful greetings in the market places" (Luke 11:43; cf. Luke 20:46)

I respect your position, but if that was the intellectual elite of Jesus’ day, why should the religious elite of today be any different? AndriesvN (talk) 13:48, 5 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Faith (true belief) is in the eye of the beholder. We agree to disagree upon the true faith. Only Seventh-day Adventists and Jehovah's Witnesses still hold out to historicist interpretation, for the vast majority of Protestants it is debunked theology since the 1850s. And Catholics and Eastern Orthodox, by and large, were not adepts of the historicist interpretation. In the end, you have proven yourself that your POV is the POV of a tiny minority. Therefore you yourself admit that WP:FRINGE fully applies to your claim. tgeorgescu (talk) 13:57, 5 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Are you saying that the Evangelicals also accept the Maccabean theory? I would be surprised. Nevertheless, I feel safer in a tiny minority. The majority is always wrong; particularly so, the intellectual elite. I want to finish my series on Daniel 9 first. Then I want to tackle the question of the authenticity of Daniel again. Regards AndriesvN (talk) 15:15, 5 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]